28 June - 16 September 2023: Alice Visentin, The morning tide of moods
The morning tide of moods presents a group of works realized by Alice Visentin between March and June 2023, the period she spent in residency at the American Academy in Rome. These works hold within them the blooming of plants in spring, the lengthening of daylight hours, the intense rains of May and the arrival of that humid heat which every year, in early summer, covers the city with a viscous air. At the same time, they also record months of encounters with places and people, fragments of stories heard or read, dreams, noises, smells and rhythms of daily gestures. Voraciously attracted by the richness of the living, in her production Visentin elaborates and blends the impressions gathered along her journey. She acts as a vessel for the materialisation of images that sometimes break off from words and that can be found in the curves of an elbow or an ear, images that emerge from the depths of memory or perhaps trickle down from an the brink of an old fountain, before disappearing in the incessant flows of a stream, like the Tiber. The creative process of the artist unfolds within this game of recomposition, turning images into stories. Figures, words, colors, arranged one next to the other, transform the meanings of things, weaving together temporalities and experiences, and thus giving shape to reality: a personal cosmos, which appears connected to everything that surrounds it.
In Visentin’s imaginative universe, just as the artist becomes a vessel, the individual cannot exist as a sealed and autonomous entity but is engaged in a dynamic relationship with the outside world, with the past and with the days to come. An interdependence which is reflected in the tangle of the display: paintings, drawings, sculptural elements and projections invade the exhibition space and generate narratives that chase each other and intertwine in a mutual dialogue.
While the numerous painted and drawn faces direct the viewer's attention to the singularity of each person, the tongues that unroll on the floor refer to language, a central theme in the artist's research, and to vocality as a nodal point of juncture between body and word. Analyzing the intrinsically relational quality of vocal expression, Adriana Cavarero describes as “true voice” the voice which “involves the throat, saliva, infancy, the patina of experienced life”[1] and that transfers the perception of one’s uniqueness from the corporal surface to the intimacy of the internal body, “the most bodily part of the body.”[2] From the outside world, information comes in through the eyes, mouth, nostrils, ears, and penetrates the depths of the subject, reaching those cavernous and fleshy cavities where it is archived, stratified and where it resonates. The work’s faces have their eyelids or lips wide-open, they gently let themselves be contaminated and scrutinized, with an available and receptive attitude.
The rummaged complexity of Visentin’s practice rejects the understanding of a fixed and univocal reality, to embrace the capricious chaos of life. The capacity to split the vision, just as the line drawn by the artist's hand splits, responds to a desire to welcome multiple perspectives and levels of perception; by abandoning full control of the focus, the secret energy that animates all things begins to vibrate. Rather than searching in bright light, we need to look in the dark spaces, linger in the folds of the bodies and of language, to rediscover also words – following Anne Carson – as “part of a system / that argues with shadow, like Venetian blinds.”[3]
The morning tide of moods evokes an emotional flow which is blue like a river, like the veins that mark our wrists or like bruises, which rises and then withdraws like the sea. It is an intuitive feeling, which celebrates irrational events, dreamlike visions, fantasies and other imagining processes as indispensable movements that guide us in the “attempt to understand, to reach awareness,” as Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes. The queer-feminist poet and theorist goes on to say that we become “able to see” only “when we shift our stance from the perceptual to the imaginal, from […] the world of ordinary everyday reality to the other reality. When we shift our attention, we enact “dreaming,” ... “seeing” from the other side, seeing the ego as other and seeing familiar elements from that other alien perspective.”[4]
[1] Adriana Cavarero, For more than one voice. Toward a philosophy of vocal expression, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2005, p. 2. In this passage Cavarero quotes and discusses an excerpt from Italo Calvino's short story A king listens.
[2] Ivi, p. 4.
[3] Anne Carson, Antropologia dell’acqua. Riflessioni sulla natura liquida del linguaggio, Donzelli Editore, Roma 2010, p. IX.
[4] Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the dark. Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2015, p. 34
Alice Visentin (b. 1993, Ciriè, Italy) graduated from Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin. Among her solo shows: Malefate, Almanac Project, Turin (2021); Planète, Italian Cultural Institute of Paris (2021); Prima persona singolare, Tile Project Space, Milan (2017). Her works have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including: Espressioni con frazioni, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Beccaria, Marianna Vecellio, Castello di Rivoli (2022); Pittura in persona, CRC Foundation, Cuneo (2021); LXII Premio Termoli, Museo MACTE, Termoli (2021); Domani, qui, oggi, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Artagon, Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2018). She won a fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome for the year 2023.
OPENING TIMES
The morning tide of moods will be on view until 16 September 2023 and can be visited by appointment.
For info please contact info@lateralroma.eu.
This project is made possible by the Fellows' Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.
28 June - 16 September 2023: Alice Visentin, The morning tide of moods
The morning tide of moods presents a group of works realized by Alice Visentin between March and June 2023, the period she spent in residency at the American Academy in Rome. These works hold within them the blooming of plants in spring, the lengthening of daylight hours, the intense rains of May and the arrival of that humid heat which every year, in early summer, covers the city with a viscous air. At the same time, they also record months of encounters with places and people, fragments of stories heard or read, dreams, noises, smells and rhythms of daily gestures. Voraciously attracted by the richness of the living, in her production Visentin elaborates and blends the impressions gathered along her journey. She acts as a vessel for the materialisation of images that sometimes break off from words and that can be found in the curves of an elbow or an ear, images that emerge from the depths of memory or perhaps trickle down from an the brink of an old fountain, before disappearing in the incessant flows of a stream, like the Tiber. The creative process of the artist unfolds within this game of recomposition, turning images into stories. Figures, words, colors, arranged one next to the other, transform the meanings of things, weaving together temporalities and experiences, and thus giving shape to reality: a personal cosmos, which appears connected to everything that surrounds it.
In Visentin’s imaginative universe, just as the artist becomes a vessel, the individual cannot exist as a sealed and autonomous entity but is engaged in a dynamic relationship with the outside world, with the past and with the days to come. An interdependence which is reflected in the tangle of the display: paintings, drawings, sculptural elements and projections invade the exhibition space and generate narratives that chase each other and intertwine in a mutual dialogue.
While the numerous painted and drawn faces direct the viewer's attention to the singularity of each person, the tongues that unroll on the floor refer to language, a central theme in the artist's research, and to vocality as a nodal point of juncture between body and word. Analyzing the intrinsically relational quality of vocal expression, Adriana Cavarero describes as “true voice” the voice which “involves the throat, saliva, infancy, the patina of experienced life”[1] and that transfers the perception of one’s uniqueness from the corporal surface to the intimacy of the internal body, “the most bodily part of the body.”[2] From the outside world, information comes in through the eyes, mouth, nostrils, ears, and penetrates the depths of the subject, reaching those cavernous and fleshy cavities where it is archived, stratified and where it resonates. The work’s faces have their eyelids or lips wide-open, they gently let themselves be contaminated and scrutinized, with an available and receptive attitude.
The rummaged complexity of Visentin’s practice rejects the understanding of a fixed and univocal reality, to embrace the capricious chaos of life. The capacity to split the vision, just as the line drawn by the artist's hand splits, responds to a desire to welcome multiple perspectives and levels of perception; by abandoning full control of the focus, the secret energy that animates all things begins to vibrate. Rather than searching in bright light, we need to look in the dark spaces, linger in the folds of the bodies and of language, to rediscover also words – following Anne Carson – as “part of a system / that argues with shadow, like Venetian blinds.”[3]
The morning tide of moods evokes an emotional flow which is blue like a river, like the veins that mark our wrists or like bruises, which rises and then withdraws like the sea. It is an intuitive feeling, which celebrates irrational events, dreamlike visions, fantasies and other imagining processes as indispensable movements that guide us in the “attempt to understand, to reach awareness,” as Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes. The queer-feminist poet and theorist goes on to say that we become “able to see” only “when we shift our stance from the perceptual to the imaginal, from […] the world of ordinary everyday reality to the other reality. When we shift our attention, we enact “dreaming,” ... “seeing” from the other side, seeing the ego as other and seeing familiar elements from that other alien perspective.”[4]
[1] Adriana Cavarero, For more than one voice. Toward a philosophy of vocal expression, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2005, p. 2. In this passage Cavarero quotes and discusses an excerpt from Italo Calvino's short story A king listens.
[2] Ivi, p. 4.
[3] Anne Carson, Antropologia dell’acqua. Riflessioni sulla natura liquida del linguaggio, Donzelli Editore, Roma 2010, p. IX.
[4] Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the dark. Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2015, p. 34
Alice Visentin (b. 1993, Ciriè, Italy) graduated from Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin. Among her solo shows: Malefate, Almanac Project, Turin (2021); Planète, Italian Cultural Institute of Paris (2021); Prima persona singolare, Tile Project Space, Milan (2017). Her works have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including: Espressioni con frazioni, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Beccaria, Marianna Vecellio, Castello di Rivoli (2022); Pittura in persona, CRC Foundation, Cuneo (2021); LXII Premio Termoli, Museo MACTE, Termoli (2021); Domani, qui, oggi, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Artagon, Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2018). She won a fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome for the year 2023.
OPENING TIMES
The morning tide of moods will be on view until 16 September 2023 and can be visited by appointment. For info please contact info@lateralroma.eu.
This project is made possible by the Fellows' Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.